Marketing Profs

Is Your Business Card Terrible?

Seth Godin thinks most business cards are terrible. "The point of your card should not be to demonstrate that you are creative," he writes at his blog. "The point should be to demonstrate that you have good taste."

His list of business card no-nos include:

• Printing cards yourself.
• Using large font sizes for your name and contact information.
• Including pictures, especially headshots.
• Lacking ample margins.

A well-designed business card does more than convey good taste. The Godin post got Ed Lee at Blogging Me Blogging You thinking about a card's value as a personal and corporate marketing tool. His reasons:

• A business card is permission- or sometimes request-based.
• Everybody reads them ... and saves them.
• They communicate a large amount of information.
  

Lee has an additional piece of advice for business card design: "They should have enough space on the back for me to write down where I met the person and a couple of tidbits of information about them."

The Po!nt: A well-designed business card not only serves a utilitarian purpose—it can help shape your image.

Sources: Seth Godin's Blog and Ed Lee's Blogging Me Blogging You.

Get to the Po!nt: Small Business mails its 100th issue! Special thanks to Christian Gulliksen, Carrie Shearer and Sharon Edwards for producing 100 installments of this high-energy, bite-sized newsletter for our 69,067 ultra-busy readers.

---